Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Wednesday December 19, 2012 @12:49PM
from the live-to-fight-another-day dept.

Grumbleduke writes "The UK Pirate Party has been forced to shut down its proxy of The Pirate Bay. The Party had been running the proxy since April, initially to support the Dutch Party's efforts, then as a means of combating censorship after the BPI obtained uncontested court orders against the UK's main ISPs to block the site across the UK. In a statement released through their lawyers, the Party cited the impossibly-high costs of legal action for their decision, but vowed to keep fighting for digital rights however they can."

I am so sensible, Sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress?

I think most people care and most people understand that the monopolies have and are doing more damage then piratical distributers of information.

Your authers are not and have not been compensated fairly for a long time. The works of tolkien were removed from the public domain in 1994 and given to a holding company in trust of tolkiens estate. They are no longer benefiting from his work, we are being punished. And people like Peter Jackson and the hollywood stuidos he works for and represents are the only people who can benifit monetarily from this work.

Yet because of the damage monopolies has caused. And the turning of copywright into personal property to be handed along from institution to institution has done, we and our descendents and all those living now are paying the price far worse then a simple tax or compensation for people who have done work.

The point is that the law is not fair and there is no fair way to change the law. The beast has become to great and we are locked in a death rattle with a python crushing us. Sensible people are not allowed to give voice to defend the public domain and what should be fair, and a fair law.

What sample bias that every single person I know personally has copied something from the internet or the radio, or recorded off of TV, or shared something they purchased with someone else who has then made copies of it themselves?

More specifically the institutions pushing for more insane copywright laws have done MORE to damage peoples personal and public image of authors and creators. I think there would be less piracy if there was not such an overwhelming force making people feel like its OK. Take for in

You can keep calling it "stealing" if you wish, but that talking point has been debunked to death. The bottom line, at least as far as this situation is concerned, is that one party has been forced into submission not through actual court order, subject to the legal process, but by the threat of such overwhelming legal action that the fear of bankruptcy is the motivator.

That you seem to think "stealing" is worse than that is a sad indication of the general public's complete misunderstanding of the issues at stake here.

I hope your faux moral superiority comforts you at night when your children are sentenced to served time in a debtor's prison.

You can keep calling it "stealing" if you wish, but that talking point has been debunked to death.

Really? Please do show me where it's been so mortally debunked. As a producer with copyright (an author of short scifi stories), I can take my words and ideas, and sell them to people who want to read/hear/otherwise-consume them. A pirate (self-declared or otherwise) can take my story, dump it on The Priate Bay, and suddenly there's a smaller market of people who will pay me for my work.

Without piracy, I have a clear route for making an income from my work. With piracy, I have to hope that my work becomes a

First and foremost, copyright infringement doesn't necessarily mean theft. There are a lot of factors to look at. If people were passing off your work as theirs, you'd have a sticking point, but only for that subset of infringement. The reason is that at that point they are stealing people who would have been paying customers of yours.

Most "pirates" have no desire to profit from your work. Your work could not be easily accessible, reasonably priced, they want to sample before they buy, or they very well are

Without piracy, I have a clear route for making an income from my work. With piracy, I have to hope that my work becomes a loss leader for itself, reaching a wider paying audience through a non-paying medium.

So how do you explain Photoshop and MS Windows being pirated by the tens of thousands for 15+ years yet they remains profitable and market leaders. Hell PS has a monopoly on the market. I'll tell you why, those products have a value that is not easily forgotten. Your books are good for a day worth of reading then done just like most entertainment. With the evolution of the internet your little manufactured scarcity went out the window. People now want instant entertainment and the technology has been there since MP3, Napster and the first PERL based shopping carts. Yet 90% of entertainment industry seems to not get it.

Ok ok lets talk about disposable entertainment. How in the world can porn be so profitable when its probably pirated more then anything, yet people are making millions on porn. They found new themes and ways to deliver their product to their users and this is why they stay profitable.

Look at the Antique business and how the internet all of a sudden made rare items not so rare anymore and lose their value. Some things are not meant to last for ever and look like lots of entertainment styles are not meant to be profitable in the internet age anymore. Maybe time to fine a new career, after all 50% of the population will go through several careers in their life times Why is writers/producers/entertainers be any different?

Please do show me where it's been so mortally debunked. As a producer with copyright (an author of short scifi stories), I can take my words and ideas, and sell them to people who want to read/hear/otherwise-consume them

I'd suggest talking to the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, Anna Troberg, about this. She's also a published author, and she held the same view as you did before she decided to study the subject. After having done so, she became a Pirate Party member and subsequently its leader.

You'll find the full story here. If you have further questions, I'm quite sure she would be happy to answer them.

Put your emotions aside, as well as try and put your morale high ground aside (like you really have one, you don't and nobody does)

lets just deal with the facts. Piracy is not going away, it doesnt matter the laws, DRM doesnt matter, nor does it matter if you bully ISP and political partys, and country's alike, to do what you want them to do, piracy will increase. There is no way to stop that.

So you can try and stand there and scream to the world with all the other copyright Nazis out there, it isn't going

Of course they don't get it right either. They call it "piracy" when the proper name is "non-commercial copyright infringement". You can make pretty much the same points you have made and the issue sparks lots of different even-sided debates, but calling it "stealing" is simply plain wrong - at best, an incredibly bad metaphor, at worst, a farcical plea for the emotions of disgust the work invoke -, regardless of the concept of "lost sales". There's a name

Without piracy, I have a clear route for making an income from my work. With piracy, I have to hope that my work becomes a loss leader for itself, reaching a wider paying audience through a non-paying medium. Sure, sometimes it will work. I've encountered a few folks who've seen some of my work freely and wanted more. On the other hand, I've also encountered folks who have outright asked me when my latest piece will be on TPB, rather than buying it.

In fact everything I've released so far has been released creative-commons.

That is your choice, and in fact it's one I rather like. Yeah, I'm human. I like getting free stuff, too. Some of the stuff I've written that I don't particularly care about (one-off philosophical rants, or abandoned worlds, or even just an interesting character that doesn't fit anywhere else) I've just dropped to public domain. Maybe somebody will care about it someday.

It's the choice that matters. I choose what my writing effort is worth. Sometimes it's worth money, sometimes it's worth the catharsis of writing, and sometimes it's worth a quick strike on the delete key, but it's my choice, not the pirates'.

No. He stole every word. OK, to be fair, since it is Sci-Fi, he probably made up a few words so that it would sound a little alien. But by and far, every word in his book was stolen from other people. He just feels justified because he stole them one word at a time.

Generally, yes. I've paid for the vast majority of works I've consumed. There are some exceptions where I pay through the magic of statistics (television, radio, and other such ad-supported media).

Of course, there are many ideas for which there is no clear source. The notion is just a part of societal knowledge. I like to think that those have been reimbursed by society as a whole, enough to be fair (though of course some are, and too many aren't). After all, that's the whole point of copyright in the first

Interestingly enough, I have been exposed to all points regarding the subject, and my opinion is partly as I said before. The "piracy is absolutely not theft" argument is just as much bullshit as the "piracy is absolutely theft" argument.

Yes, theft and copyright infringement are different. One's a civil matter and the other's criminal. One results in the loss of a physical item, and the other results in someone gaining a copy. The implementation details are obviously different What remains the same though is the offense. If you steal $1 from my wallet, I'll have $1 less than I would without your interference. If you copy one of my books rather than buy it, I'll have (let's say) $1 less than I would without your interference. Of course, you may not have bought my book in the first place, and I may have dropped that $1 bill by accident. There's probabilities involved, I know, but that's not the point.

The point is that it's no longer my choice what happens to the book or the bill. I produce something, but I'm not allowed to decide what happens with it. I had a bill in my wallet, but I'm not allowed to choose how I spend it. That's where the analogy to theft comes from: pirates aren't stealing an object. They're forcing their way.

That's always the issue that gets forgotten when someone "debunks" the "stealing is theft" analogy. A big deal is made about how information wants to be free, and how the producers make record profits, and how piracy leads to so much more exposure, but they none of the pro-piracy advocates seem to care that this all happened by the pirates' sheer overwhelming force.

Yes, it's terribly wrong that the Pirate Party can't afford to fight. It's also terribly wrong that producers don't let their work go free once it's passed a certain age, or profitably, or some other nice metric. It's also terribly wrong to force someone else to live by your choices.

my open-source firmware (I am currently writing a lot of audio/stereo controller stuff) is, no doubt, being used by hardware vendors and being sold as their own. I can see some items on ebay, for example, that have my feature set and this happened a few months after I published my code and schematics.

I don't make very much at all on my efforts, and believe me, I put a LOT of time and creativity into this design.

What remains the same though is the offense. If you steal $1 from my wallet, I'll have $1 less than I would without your interference. If you copy one of my books rather than buy it, I'll have (let's say) $1 less than I would without your interference.

No, because I wouldn't have bought your crummy book anyway. You didn't lose anything on me.

Let me paraphrase this assertion for you: "I never planned to give you any compensation for your work anyways". You know... that sounds a lot like stealing.

This is post-action justification. You don't start from the perspective of "I feel like pirating things today. I know, I'll pirate this book I never would have bought". What happens is you browse the torrent sites, or potentially read a review, and think to yourself "this sounds interesting enough to look at". From here, there are two paths you might ta

Or there might be a larger market of people who will pay you for your work. There will certainly be a larger market of people who will see your work.

There might very well be a larger market, but I don't get to choose it. I could also get a larger market seeing my work by hiring trucks to drive down city streets with loudspeakers playing a reading, but that might not actually be what I want. What the fuck gives you the right to decide what happens to my work?

If and only if you can get a publisher to buy it.

Or publish it myself, or hand it to friends and say "give this only to people who'll appreciate it". Again, I can decide where and how my work is distributed, and from that how much risk I must take.

Freedom of speech for starters.
Furthermore, the idea of owning ideas is ludicrous. That is not how humans work. We copy good ideas, and that fact is what makes us humans. It is what have allowed us to be where we are today. Without copying, fire would be reserved for one tribe, the wheel for another, and farming would be a local phenomenon in the middle East and China.
Finally, your work has been influenced by countless others before you, so if you claim that copying an idea is stealing, you are as much a

In the absence of income from their work, there will be no professional writers. Period.

But would that be a bad thing? If you walk into a bookstore (do they still exist?) and look around you, you'll see plenty of professional writers. Most of them are crap, though (citation, if needed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO8F1HJjzkA [youtube.com] ), and even the good ones are derivative to a degree you wouldn't expect (check tvtropes). Most good writers really want to write. Need to. If you take out profit as a motivation, we'll still have new books. Better books, probably, because then only truly passionate peo

In the absence of income from their work, there will be no professional writers. Period.

God, I despise this fallacy. There were tons of work before modern copyright existed, and tons more when it was sensible, before our current insanity. Books were written, music was created, art was made... Hell, if you completely removed money from the equation (magically no one will pay, ever, which is implausible at best), music would be made, books would be written, and art created.

I don't get paid a cent, and I still do photography (I don't want to get paid, I do it for its own sake), my girlfriend has never made a cent, and still paints. I know many a friend who plays free concerts, and social gigs, just because they love making music, and love making people happy with it.

Another faulty preconception you include is the fact that artists shouldn't have real jobs, like the rest of us. I don't actually see any reason to believe this, as most artists DO have real jobs, even if they dream of being the next big-wig famous, remarkably rich, artist. There is no "right" to be a self-employed artist who has the money to only do art. You might get lucky, you might have the remarkable talent in self-promotion to make this happen, but there is no right to this. Again, most artists struggle, most artists have a normal job like the rest of us, only the very top of the herd can live off their art, and only after years and years of hard work usually.

So: no more Jules Vernes, no more Robert Heinleins, no more Iain M. Banks, and no more consistently high-quality streams of work from writers who are free to concentrate on writing, because their writing pays the bills, instead of being forced to focus on plumbing, or selling cars, or doing double-entry accounting, because the bills MUST be paid.

So how did these people ever manage to get to where they are today while having a normal job? There is a catch 22 here, since to be a good writer you can't have a job, but in order to shed your job you have to be a good writer. This is bullshit, again. 90% of all artists work, or they're starving and either near homeless or just plain homeless.

To be honest, I can live without your book. I don't actually give a shit. I can live without 90% of all culture (and do, culture is vast, and their is now way to engage it all). I don't NEED obscenely successful books or music, or art. And as stated previously, it all would still exist anyways. Half the art in our house was painted by friends and acquaintances, half the shows I go to are local kids, and friends. Books haven't quite gotten there, but in a few years they probably will be. And actually most of the crap they makes enough money to allow the author to quit their job, is probably crap. Sure, you can say Heinlein, but I can retort with Twilight, or Daniel Steele, or now the 50 Shades of Grey lady, or...

I realize that most idiots sincerely believe that professional-quality writing is something that "anybody can do." Being idiots, they are, of course, completely, utterly, and profoundly wrong about that. In fact, there is only a relatively small percentage of the population who have the inherent talent to write well enough to eventually become professionals at it. Idiots like hazah are almost certainly not among them.

How do you know Hazah isn't, or can't be an author? Do you personally know him or her? And what makes you think you can be one, or be professional? How many authors think they are, try to publish something, and then are never heard from again because no one cared? Don't get me wrong, I wish you luck, but you have to realize that everyone who ever tried to be an author probably felt the same way. Most of them were wrong. Hell, I used to think I would be the next Thomas Pynchon, but sadly I couldn't be, even if I had 60,000 words. I still write, but now just because I enjoy it.

I hope your faux moral superiority comforts you at night when your children are sentenced to served time in a debtor's prison.

You're talking about people who choose not to take/steal things based on principle, even when it's trivially easy and "everyone's doing it". You are, moreover, taking the side of those who claim it's their right to do the opposite and acquire music, movies, and software, even when it's illegal, because of some theorized "digital rights", or because of a vague claim of "information wants to be free", or because "it benefits everyone in the end".

"Stealing" has both a legal meaning, and a layman meaning. For the latter, you can argue semantics all night. For the former, it will depend on jurisdictions, but as far as English law (which is relevant here), it is definitely not theft. You can have a look at the relevant statute law [legislation.gov.uk], or case law such as Boardman v Phipps [bailii.org], Oxford v Moss [wikipedia.org] or Phillips v Mulcaire [bailii.org] (although more obiter stuff, more in the Court of Appeal case).

Legally, in England, you cannot steal information or data. It is that simple.

OK then. Lets get a bit more specific. Borrowing from someone else who said this somewhere in this article's comments:

If it's theft, then why are they charged with infringing copyright instead of larceny etc?

Theft and copyright infringement are both wrong. Given. However, that does not make them the same thing. Please don't continue to murk the waters by using one in place of the other - people who don't understand are apt to get them mixed up (case in point: the "you wouldn't steal a car" pre-roll at the m

The point is that the legal merits don't even matter because the Party can't argue them. It doesn't matter whether what they were doing was legal or illegal, right or wrong, no one will be able to find out because they can't afford to fight the case.

Some people may view this as the right outcome, but I would suggest that no one should think it was for the right reasons. Justice should not be dependent on wealth.

Doesn't the UK have a "loser pays" system for lawsuit legal expenses? That creates some different dynamics here, since it means that unless the Pirate Party is very certain of their case, they could end up liable for both sides.

That's a law from Serbia... it doesn't really apply in the UK. The UK law on political parties is considerably more complex and antiquated (and pre-dates the idea of companies etc.) - no one is quite sure how it works, but it seems that English political parties don't have legal personality (unless they set up some sort of company).

If it's "stealing" why isn't anyone charged with theft? They're charged with copyright infringement. Doesn't that tell you that it's copying not stealing?

Who on earth cares? The point is it's illegal and wrong. Does it matter what you call it, or do mere definitions and semantics make something better or worse?

"You just stole money from me! You're a thief!"

"Why, no, I merely changed some digital indicators to increase an arbitrary number called a 'balance' in my electronic bank records and effect a corresponding decrease on the same data cell in your electronic bank records."

When it comes to court cases, being right (or at least being not-wrong), it often matters less what the law says and more what your bank account says. And, as long as the world works this way the bullies of litigation will continue doing what they do and passing along their legal fees to customers.

There is no actual "Justice" available. Its for sale these days, all it takes is enough litigation to break the opposition, or the threat of it, and your principles, justice, honor etc, is meaningless. So we have gone from "Justice is Blind" to "Justice is a Whore"...This is why corporations are so evil I think, it enables people with an agenda to wield bigger bank accounts with zero risk to themselves and use those to bludgeon free speech and political opinion to death.

Most of those would actually be completely unenforceable with today's technology... and among those that might even be theoretically enforceable, even at a minimum would require cutting the nation off from all communication with outside countries, including all forms of international travel, unless you could get the entire world to agree to a single governing body.

As a result of this proxy their site has jumped into the top-ten UK sites for traffic from being down in the mumble-hundreds. That's going to be a pretty penny in traffic costs.

Suddenly from on high comes a reason for them to shut it down.

The court order in question specifically lists the six ISPs that are required to block the Pirate Bay. The Pirate Party is not on the list. Neither is my ISP. The BPI is not suing my ISP. What makes the Pirate Party so special?

s97A Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 [legislation.gov.uk] allows anyone, including the BPI (or their minions) to apply to the court to get an order requiring any "service provider" to block access to any website or similar service. This is how they got their blocking order against both ThePirateBay and Newzbin2. BT tried to fight the Newzbin2 ruling and got hit by a massive costs order. There's a reason no ISP has dared to fight any such order since (including the TPB orders).

I'll let others do the usual list of reasons why pirating is better for all mankind, and just point out that the digital rights referred to may be the access to resources on the internet (TPB), being allowed to host a proxy (as they had doe), or redirect (as some others do).

It is most unfortunate that they're basically giving up the fight. It makes their statement that they'll continue to fight the good fight elsewhere a bit hollow. I realize one should fight the battles one can win, live to fight another

You are absolutely right! Last week a friend of mine wanted digital copies of some of my CD's. Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, and of course...Bach. I told him to sod off with that glowing feeling in my gut, the knowledge that with one less dirty rotten thief these artists have a better chance of being fairly compensated for their works and will continue to create new music. Plus, I'm sure that when these artists die their works will be released into the public domain in a reasonable amount of time.

Speaking of sophistry - I'd like to know which artists are going hungry due to piracy, and which artists are going hungry because *IAA affiliated companies don't pass the profits on to the starving artists. Give me a list of artists who have missed a meal because pirates "stole" their music, so that all us "pirates" can send them a dollar or two. Oh, those poor suffering artists! The idea just hurts my soul!

When they speak of digital rights they mean the ability to get any piece of software without compensating the person/people who created the software, and who are not giving that software away.

Sometimes the author is neither giving the work away nor selling it. For example, how should one obtain a copy of the film Song of the South, the TV series Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea, or the English version of the video game Mother (the Famicom game before Earthbound) while fairly compensating the author? And how should one compensate HBO [theoatmeal.com] for Game of Thrones without compensating Disney for ESPN, an unwanted service?

Which is why I use to suggest anti-copyright activists should start hammering into their (and their opponents) discourse the much needed counter-concept of "copyduty".

Copyright discussions are always about currently on-sale IP, but the tons upon tons of nowhere-to-be-legally-found copyrighted content out there that's dying is quite worrisome. From the three branches of IP, trademark is the only one that comes with a duty: if you don't actively use and protect your trademark, you lose it. Copyrights and pate

It should. A right (to restrict distribution) without a corresponding duty (to do said distribution yourself) is unbalanced. And worldwide distribution at that. 'N' years without publishing and presto, right lost, similar to what happens with trademarks. (See also my answer to the OP for more on this notion.)

So basically, you believe I, as an author, should be required to release ALL my work on your time schedule [...]

Absolutely. If you want copyright which lasts two lifetimes, there should be a compulsory publishing duty. If there is no incentive for the rights holder to publish, the copyright has no value anyway. Locking up works (essentially indefinitely) with no copyright value deprives the public domain. Disney's Song of the South is a great example. My kids have never seen it and have no idea wha

Do you also demand I release the many, many pieces of crap I've written but not published over the years?

There's a difference between works that you've never published or publicly exhibited and the works I'm talking about. The film Song of the South was publicly exhibited in U.S. movie theaters several decades ago. The television series Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea was publicly exhibited on Nickelodeon more than two decades ago. The video game Mother was first published before Famicom games were discontinued; therefore about two decades ago.

Don't forget the absurdity of the other extreme, which is exactly what many interested parties are after:

1) Everyone must pay for every individual use of every bit of software and data on every piece of hardware they own.2) Software patents ensure that only the patent owner can produce any software that is even remotely similar to the outright-obvious thing patented.

This results in a world where the few wealthy players are the only people who can produce any software at all, and they can price gouge horribl

Actually, software piracy is pretty minimal in the UK - at least, through personal downloading (rather than commercial-scale forgetting-how-many-computers-you-are-allowed-to-install-it-on infringement); according to Ofcom's recent study [ofcom.org.uk], only 2% of Internet users have illegally downloaded any software ever (compared with 6% for TV and film, and 8% for music). And as for it being free, about 85% of software that was acquired online *was* free.

You should read Doctorow. It won't cost you a dime, he puts his books on boingboing for free and credits that for his standing as a best selling author. IINM "Makers" is the one with a good explanation for teh worth of piracy, but I could be wrong. Hell, read them all, they're free. You might wind up with a few copies on your shelf and him with an extra buck or two.

I wonder why libraries never put print authors out of business? I wonder why I have a dozen Asimov books on my shelf, when every single one of them is or was available at the library? After all the library is a monstrous pirate haven, with all those people getting books, CDs, and DVDs for no cost whatever! The horror! Close down all the libraries!

Nobody ever lost money from piracy, but many talented artists have starved from obscurity. And IMO anyone who can't understand that is not very intelligent.

The Party did. It raised over £9,000* in the last couple of weeks from supporters. Which is great... but just getting preliminary advice over the last couple of weeks has cost £1,600, and fighting this case to trial could cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. While it might be possible to raise that money, the feeling seems to be that it could be spent better elsewhere (although, of course, those who donated to the legal fight should have already been emailed to explain how they can get their donations refunded).

I find it particularly ironic that we are told pirates are stealing money/income from artists etc., but it turns out pirates don't have that much money - whereas the BPI Ltd (all of whose funding would otherwise be going to artists etc.) seems to have plenty of cash to throw at lawyers and legal actions.

*But less than £10,000 - you can't make this up...

[Disclaimer: I am a member of, and work for PPUk, but was not one of the individuals sued.]

Straw-man. Unlike the aggressor, the people are average and live average lives with average incomes. Unlike the aggressor, there is not an endless coffer from which to resupply. When the choice is to eat, or to fight an uncertain battle, the fallout is far from surprising.

"Your honour, we want a new order against the Pirate Party because they are acting as a service provider within the scope of s97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and are providing access to a website that they know is being used to infringe copyright."

"OK, here's your order - also, as the law is (mostly) clear, they were wasting all our time, so I'll make them pay all your costs on an indemnity basis."

Much much better is for everyone who consider this court abuse by BPI to join their local Pirate Party. We're represented in over 40 countries, and if there isn't one in yours you're welcome to copy what you need from another Pirate Party to get started;)